I'm shitposting and at work but i'm sure someone will come in and give a proper account of everything but as I understand it they were seen as something akin to a petite bourgeois class. I really need to brush up ussr history myself tbh. Also, again as far as I know, gulags were basically just prisons and the word is mostly used by the west to conjure up the idea of a scary slave camp bc of anti-soviet propaganda.